Saturday, 29 December 2012

Having set
myself the challenge, and a number of more pressing demands notwithstanding, I
decided to count composer appearances in 2012 concerts too. (For operas, click here.)
Even leaving aside what I suspect will prove to have been questionable
arithmetic, this is a more approximate business. I have simply counted a
composer once if he, or very occasionally she, appeared in a programme, whether for its
entirety or for a more Webern-like moment. Encores have not been counted. Nor
have operas in concert performance, since they are included in the other list.

Beethoven’s
pole position owes not a little to the superlative symphony cycle at the Proms
from Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Boulez’s inclusion
owes literally everything to the same series of concerts. I was delighted to see Liszt appear more highly than I had expected. The final set of composers
presents something of a rag-bag, some composers included only because they were part of a programme that otherwise interested me. (I shall exercise a little self-restraint and forego naming them.) The composer I was genuinely shocked to discover there
was the greatest of all, Johann Sebastian Bach. Poor Schoenberg, entirely absent
from the list of operas, also scrapes but a single performance, likewise Webern. Moreover, I have only just realised that, greatly to my surprise, Stravinsky is entirely absent. I shall hope, then, for a 2013 with less 'authenticity' and more dodecaphony...

I have attempted - and probably failed - to count the operas, including two Met broadcasts and concert performances, I have seen in 2012. The breakdown by composer is below. What if anything it indicates, I am not entirely sure, though it will doubtless indicate something regarding my own interests and something regarding what opera houses make available. Sadly no Schoenberg, for instance...

Monday, 24 December 2012

First, I should like to wish
my readers a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I am deeply touched and
genuinely surprised by how many of you there are, and greatly value your
comments, discussion, and support. 2012 has brought a good number of fine
performances, many more than I can practically list here. (They may all of
course be found by consulting the archive on the right.) Last year I
experimented with division into categories, a principal motivation for doing so
having been that I felt opera tended otherwise to lose out, it being easier to
attain a consistently high level of performance in, say, a string quartet
recital than in an artwork involving a conductor, an orchestra, a host of
singers, various contributors to staging, etc. This year, however, I felt that
there was no need to do so, since operatic performances urged inclusion without
any favourable weighting; indeed, rather to my surprise, there is more opera
than anything else. The final number and thus selection are ultimately
arbitrary, but as in 2010, I thought that twelve, an average of one per month,
was selective enough. Here, then, in no order other than the chronological are
my dozen performances of 2012:

1.Two performances from Maurizio Pollini
really ought to have been included, but in order to keep myself to twelve overall,
I limited myself to this Royal
Festival Hall performance of Chopin and Liszt. Pollini’s Chopin is rightly
the stuff of legend; his Liszt should be so. Were I to be told that anyone had
ever heard a more coruscating performance of the B minor sonata, even from
Sviatoslav Richter, I should not believe it.

2.Mahler has had a tough few years.
Over-exposure and relegation of his œuvre to the status of orchestral showpieces
has meant that few performances have measured up, many of us having therefore
been led to abstain completely. Daniele Gatti’s blistering performance of the Fifth Symphony, along with
music from Parsifal, was quite the
finest live performance I have ever heard of the work. I am not sure that I
have heard the Philharmonia on better form either.

4.On the other hand, Daniel Barenboim’s Proms
Beethoven and Boulez cycle with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was, as a
whole, every bit as memorable. I could happily have chosen every one of the
five concerts, but ‘tough choices’, as a war criminal once said... In a sense,
then, to select the
Ninth is merely indicative – and perhaps misleading, given that no Boulez
was performed in this grand finale. But
it is The Ninth, even more than the Fifth is The Fifth, despite the fact that
Barenboim’s Fifth was the only live performance I have heard worthy of the
work. The liberating experience of hearing symphonic Beethoven treated with the
seriousness of meaning it demands was matched by the still-extraordinary
testimony of Barenboim’s young orchestra.

5.Bayreuth brought a disappointing new FlyingDutchman, the final outing of Stefan Herheim’s legendary Parsifal, and Hans
Neuenfels’s now classic Lohengrin,
considerably stronger than last year, not least vocally and orchestrally.
Indeed, Andris Nelsons’s conducting was perhaps ultimately the reason to choose
this production, given the bitterly disappointing results of Gatti’s
replacement by Philippe Jordan for Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel.

6.Bernd
Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten
was done proud by the Salzburg Festival. The general tenor of Alexander Pereira’s
programming had raised fears of a new populism, CarmenandLa bohème
appearing in the same year (the latter infinitely preferable to a mindless
production, perversely conducted, of Bizet’s work). One could forgive almost
anything, however, for this performance from an outstanding cast headed by
Laura Aikin, with Ingo Metzmacher on the best form I have heard him at the helm
of an equally superlative Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. When that orchestra
puts its obstreperous collective mind to doing so, it can excel just as much in
‘difficult’ modernist repertoire as in Mozart.

7.The heroic Birmingham Opera Company
offered the simply astounding achievement – which might even have led me to
edge out Sir Colin’s Grande messe des
morts – by staging world
premiere performances of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch.
This is just the thing every prestigious company in the world should have been
fighting to present, yet sadly, as we know all too well, endless pandering revivals
of Verdi and worse tend to be their priority. Every person taking part in
Graham Vick’s production deserved a medal for an achievement far more meaningful,
far more daring, than anything to be seen at London’s Olympic Park.

9.Sometimes I feel as though I am the only
advocate for Haydn’s operas. How wrong I was. A performance such as that
presented by Royal
Academy Opera of La vera costanza
was worth many thousands of words. Trevor Pinnock’s fresh, lively conducting
and an excellent young cast combined to make for a wonderful evening in the
theatre.

10.Alice
Coote and the Britten Sinfonia offered a splendid traversal of repertoire
from Purcell to Tippett at the Wigmore Hall. If Coote’s bravura Handel was
worth the price of admission alone, so was the Britten Sinfonia’s treatment of the
composer’s work as music rather than pseudo-archaeology. Ditto Purcell.

11.Much to my surprise, a second Mahler
performance makes the list, this time from the Tonkünstler-Orchester
Nieder Österreich and Andrés Oroczo-Estrada. In a case not entirely unlike that
of Barenboim’s Furtwänglerian restoration of meaning to Beethoven, if perhaps
without the degree of defiance necessary in that particular instance, ‘designer
Mahler’ gave way to a Second Symphony authentic in the only sense that matters.
Should one find oneself wondering anew
at Mahler’s ambition, imagination, and moral purpose, a performance will have
been successful. I wondered anew for quite some time and much look forward to
hearing orchestra and conductor again.

12.Finally, again from Vienna, the Theater
an der Wien’s new staging of Hindemith’s Mathis
der Maler. Bertrand de Billy and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra excelled
themselves; so did an excellent Slovak chorus and a fine cast headed
unforgettably by Wolfgang Koch in the title role. The contrast with the tired
repertoire and productions being regurgitated at the State Opera was telling;
still more so was the conviction on offer from all concerned, not least
director Keith Warner, whose staging proved both visually arresting and
intellectually provocative.

Having been out of London for
almost the entire run of Meyerbeer’s Robert
le diable, the only possibility was for me to catch the final performance.
For once, I was very glad to have cast a fulsome number of pennies the way of
the Royal Opera House. This was by any standards an important yet neglected
work, by a crucially important yet all-but-ignored composer: just the sort of
thing of which we should be seeing more on the Covent Garden stage. Frankly
anything would be better than yet another outing for La triviata. (The cancellation of Oberon last season in favour of extending still further the number
of performances of that most nauseating of operas still rankles almost beyond
words.) I was vaguely aware of the criticism Robert received whilst I was away, and was unsurprised to discover
how uninformed most of it was. A typical example, from a journalist I recently had the
misfortune to hear mindlessly yet tirelessly haranguing the Artistic Director
of the Salzburg Festival for having programmed Gawain rather than a Britten opera (as a ‘contemporary’ work!), may be read here.
(Given the critical acuity with which that
writer approached the most recent staging of Gawain at Covent Garden, one can understand why he might have
wished to spare himself such undue challenge once again. One can certainly only
continue to marvel that anyone is willing to pay him for writing such drivel.) People are perfectly at liberty not to like this work, indeed to criticise it as harshly as they feel necessary, but one would hope for a little more intelligence in the act.

No one – one hopes, even at
that lowly critical level – would deny Robert
its historical importance, staged one hundred times at the Paris Opéra within
three years of its 1831 premiere and by 1835 seen at seventy-seven houses in
ten countries. Meyerbeer’s influence on Wagner, to name but the most important
example, runs deeper than most suspect; it was certainly not difficult,
especially as the score progressed, to hear presentiments of The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin, as well as the more obvious Rienzi (‘Meyerbeer’s greatest opera’, in Hans von Bülow’s truthful
quip.) Echoes of Der Freischütz are increasingly
evident too, and not just in the more overtly ‘demonic’ third act, Weber
himself of course heavily influenced by French and Italian music. Originality
might not always be Meyerbeer’s strongest suit – what seemed either to be a
quotation or direct plagiarism from Beethoven’s Symphony in the final act made
me smile, though if one is going to steal, doing so from Beethoven shows good
taste – yet claims of incompetence seemed to me wildly clear of the mark. Even
in cut form – would it really have hurt to have retained an extra half-hour’s
worth of music? – there are at the very least competent pacing and structure.
(Contrast that with many works that bafflingly continue to hold the
stage!)And that despite the undeniable dramaturgical
weakness of Raimbaut’s disappearance from the plot, a consequence of the move
from originally-planned opéra-comique,
in which his relationship with Alice loomed considerably larger,to grand
opéra.

However, what struck me most
of all was how untrue all the claims about alleged ‘unmemorability’ were. If
tunes were your thing, you could hear a good few, and there was much more to
nourish too, not least a good deal of attractive woodwind writing. The cello
line highlighting the self-serving nature of Bertram’s apparent gallantry
towards Alice in their third act duet struck me as a revealing dramatic touch,
and that is but one example. Yes, there are examples of music that tend towards
inconsequentiality or straightforward inappropriateness, but for me at least,
they were surprisingly few. If the treatment of religion in the fifth act
reduces it to little more than vaguely exotic ‘colour’, than Meyerbeer and
Scribe are not alone in that failing; we suffer far worse from Gounod much more
regularly. The theme of damnation, moreover, seems to me more interestingly
handled than in many treatments; with Robert, one feels a true conflict in his
choice between Heaven and Hell, their causes pleaded by Bertram and Alice
respectively. There is no need to exaggerate; this is no Damnation de Faust; nor does Meyerbeer approach the compositional
interest of Berlioz, let alone Wagner. Yet he pens a far more interesting, if
uneven, score than anything by Verdi or Donizetti, whom houses inflict upon us
with mind-numbing frequency. I doubt, however, that anything could redeem the
third-act ballet: one of the most preposterous things I have ever seen, a cloister
bacchanale for nuns risen from their tombs. Even if it had been handled more
convincingly than here, Lionel Hoche’s embarrassing choreography, replete with
strange noises, presumably intended as ‘erotic’, very much hailing from the
school of Andrew George (as witnessed most recently in the
dreadful McVicar Troyens.) If
only we had had Calixto Bieito, perhaps the scene might have stood a chance.
Perhaps, I repeat.

Where the Royal Opera
performance truly fell down was in both the stage direction and the conducting:
a very real problem for a work so little known and so easy to consign once
again to the dustbin of history. Laurent Pelly’s production would doubtless
have apologists praising its ‘whimsy’, most likely irritatingly prefaced by the
offensive stereotype ‘Gallic’. It hovers uncertainly between sending up the
work – not, I think, a course that would work, but it should at least be
pursued with consistency – and attempting to take it a little more seriously.
The multi-coloured, cartoon-like designs (Chantal Thomas) of the first two acts
give way to something a little more plausible, though nowhere near the grand opéra spectacle one probably needs
here. Either that, it seems, or a thorough-going deconstruction. Most insulting
however was the unbridled kitsch of cardboard cut-out jaws of Hell and angelic
heavenly clouds in the final act; if a director cannot manage better than that,
then he ought to leave the work to someone who can.

Daniel Oren’s conducting
served Meyerbeer equally badly. Entirely lacking in direction, let alone fire,
this was listlessness to a degree so advanced that one almost suspected
deliberate sabotage. (Alas the result was not interesting enough to justify the
charge.) The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House often sounded, reasonably
enough, uninspired, though there were many passages in which the musicians rose
above the confines of such deathly conducting. What I suspect this music really
needs is either the theatrical fire and brimstone of a Riccardo Muti or an
approach that would bring to the fore its German roots and implications; in
that case, the likes of Christian Thielemann or even Daniel Barenboim would perfectly
fit the bill. (Thielemann is about to conduct Rienzi, so it is perhaps not an entirely absurd suggestion.)A third-rate Kapellmeister is unlikely to attract many converts.

The singing was often very
good indeed, though, imparting more of a sense of the work’s potentialities than
one might have expected. Bryan Hymel was not the strongest of links, alas, but
his Robert at least benefited from stamina. Unfortunately, a combination of
painful French and still more a lack of French style, singing his lines as if
they were Puccini, severely compromised the title role. Otherwise, Marina
Poplavskaya turned in by far the strongest performance I have heard from her.
Intonational difficulties seemed to have been banished. Her coloratura put
Hymel to shame. And she did her best, pretty successfully on the whole, to
present Alice as a convincing character rather than the cardboard cut-out to
which the production attempted to reduce her (and everyone else). Sofia Fomina,
a singer entirely new to me, offered a ravishing performance as Isabelle, the
Sicilian princess. Tone and line were impeccable throughout. John Relyea was at
least equally impressive as Bertram, devilish darkness very much his thing. His
French was a distinct improvement upon most of the cast too. (Do language
coaches not instruct their charges that there is a great deal more to the
admittedly difficult task of singing in French than just about mustering
school-boy pronunciation?) Choral singing was as excellent as one has come to
expect from Renato Balsadonna’s Royal Opera Chorus.

Where, then does Meyerbeer
stand? Lower than he ought to, I think. Even Wagner, for all the ungrateful
abuse he hurled Meyerbeer’s way, would sometimes acknowledge his stronger
points. This is not a great work, but nor does it deserve the abuse heaped upon
it by people of rather lesser standing than Wagner. I certainly cannot begin to
understand how they can endure, even praise, nineteenth-century operas twenty
times more trivial and yet react in the way they have to Robert le diable. Is this a mere case of me faire avocat du diable? If so, not to a great extent; I was
genuinely interested by what I heard.Whatever
Meyerbeer deserves, and I think he deserves considerably more than we grant
him, he deserves neither Oren nor Pelly. Nor, I am sad to report, does he
deserve a truly horrendous audience, spluttering, chattering, dropping things,
laughing uproariously at nothing whatsoever. Who are these people, why do they
bother attending at all, and whither might we return them?

Weber’s Andante e Rondo ungarese seems nowadays more often to be performed
in its later bassoon version, but was originally written for viola and
orchestra. I am afraid I had the same problem I have with most of Weber’s music
written before the great trilogy of three ‘late’ operas: bewilderment that such
trivial, anonymous music could have been written by the same man who composed Der Freischütz. In this case, the
problem was compounded by use of what I assume must have been a piano reduction
of the orchestral score; at any rate, no credit was given, either to Weber or
to someone else. It put me in mind of accompanying for Associated Board exams –
somehow, as a teenage schoolboy, I used to think that £10 was an acceptable
rate, rehearsals included, but it certainly taught me to listen to other musicians – and especially
so in some thumping chords it is difficult to imagine anyone who actually
played the piano having written as such. There was, however, some gorgeous
lyrical tone to savour from Gérard Caussé. It was amiable enough, I suppose,
but an odd choice and, in whatever guise, ultimately banal, form seemingly
little more than a matter of adding section to section. Did this really hail
from the composer of Euryanthe? It
sounded closer to Donizetti.

With Brahms, inevitably, one could
think and feel: now for some real music. The op.120 sonatas – sorry,
clarinettists – have always seemed to me still more suited to the viola, its
rich, dark tone as suited to the composer as the dark mahogany of a Hamburg
panelled room. Caussé proved warm and
clean of tone, well-nigh ideal. The first movement’s tempo was well chosen,
also flexible without drawing attention to itself. After a slightly anonymous
start, the piano grew in stature too, also benefiting from a richly Romantic
tone to Michel Dalberto’s Bechstein (an excellent, fitting choice of
instrument). Brahms’s rippling, cumulative complexity found a convincing
dialectical relationship with his melodic (viola and piano) genius. The music sounded closer to the violin sonatas
with these forces, and rightly so. Metrical dislocations told in the second
movement: more the piano’s doing than the viola’s, again without exaggeration.
Perhaps structure might have been a little more malleable or protean, a little
less sectional; the transition back to Tempo
I seemed tacked on rather than a necessity. Nevertheless, there was some
fine ghostly as well as ardent playing in the reprise. The players grasped the
singular mood of the finale, poised between melancholy and passion, dramatising
the conflict between them.

This was, I think, the first
time I had heard Liszt’s transcription of Harold
en Italie. It is a marvellous work; I cannot imagine why it is not heard
more often. But then Liszt is the transcriber, arranger, and paraphraser to
vanquish all others, with the possible exception of his heir Busoni. I barely
missed Berlioz’s orchestra at all: quite a claim, the more I think about it. In
this performance, Dalberto’s piano opening was fluent, full of anticipation,
quite unlike the piano reduction of the Weber piece. There were touches, if
only from time to time, of Lisztian bravura too. Caussé made an amusingly
melodramatic entrance on stage, ready for his viola entry, quite in keeping, I
thought, with Berlioz’s Romantic sensibility and once again lavished his
beautiful tone upon the music. Intriguingly, the music begins to sound more
virtuosic in this transcription. Might Paganini have accepted it after all?
Probably not, but I could not help but wonder. Nervous rhythmic eccentricity
came across strongly too. Dalberto’s repeated piano notes towards the end were
worth hearing for their own sake. The ‘Marche des pèlerins’ was on the swift
side, but perhaps that was as much a matter of dealing with the piano’s
relative lack of sustaining power as anything else. Both transcription and
performance imbued the movement with high Romanticism, quite different from the
more Classically-inclined Berlioz one hears from, say, Sir Colin Davis. The
third movement was spirited and again surprisingly virtuosic (from both). It
was fascinating as ever to hear how much of Liszt’s own personality shines
through, even when he is as faithful to the original as here. The same could be
said of the final orgy, though on occasion Dalberto’s rendition of the piano
part suffered from a certain hardening of tone. I was not entirely convinced by
Caussé’s exit from stage, followed by a return for the end: too much of a good
thing. However, it did mean that one concentrated, once past the surprise, upon
Liszt’s piano writing. Dalberto’s rendition was not flawless but impressed
nevertheless. The delightful choice of first encore – alas, I missed the
second, not having realised that there would be one – was Schubert’s Ständchen, in what seemed to be Liszt’s
piano transcription, with the vocal part transferred to the viola from the
second stanza onwards. It sounded quite magical, performed with delightful
Romantic sweep.

How pleasurable to be ending –
well, almost, for a visit to Robert le
diable at Covent Garden still beckons – my operatic year on such a high
note! The Theater an der Wien is now generally acknowledged to offer
substantially more interesting fare than the Vienna State Opera, the latter’s
great orchestra notwithstanding. Indeed, during a sojourn of just over a
fortnight in Vienna, the Staatsoper could summon up nothing that was not of the
Italian nineteenth century; the only prospect I could even begin to face was La bohème, until I realised that remained
in a production by the ultra-vulgarist, Berlusconi-supporting Franco
Zeffirelli. Not for the first time I was led to fond remembrance of Boulez’s
great clarion call from a 1967 interview with Der Spiegel: ‘To a theatre in which mostly repertoire pieces are
performed one can only with the greatest difficulty bring a modern opera – it
is unthinkable. The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses
into the air. But do you not think that that might also be the most elegant
solution?’ The Theater an der Wien has avoided the deep, one is almost tempted
to say insurmountable, problems arising from a repertoire system by adopting instead
the stagione principle: no pointless,
barely rehearsed revivals – if indeed ‘revival’ can remotely be considered the mot juste for Zeffirelli et al. – of moribund works and
productions, but bespoke productions, such as this new staging of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler: hardly, I admit, a ‘modern
opera’, but a great, unaccountably neglected, work from a century that still receives bizarrely short shrift
from so many houses. The results, at least on this occasion, spoke for
themselves. (Exemplary programmes are produced too.)

Albrecht of Brandenburg (Kurt Streit)

Hindemith remains a deeply
unfashionable composer. To a certain extent that is not undeserved. His absurd
claims about ‘tonality’ as a natural force, ‘like gravity’, do not help; history
has undoubtedly proved Schoenberg right. The concept of Gebrauchsmusik, even if more sophisticated than one might expect,
likewise remains problematical at best, many would say untenable.Moreover, some of the accusations
hurled at Hindemith’s music are not unfair in particular cases: there is a good
amount of grey, even turgid stuff to throw out as bathwater, before we arrive
at fine babies such as Mathis, surely
the composer’s most singular masterpiece. Its message of an artist, Matthias Grünewald,
painter of the Isenheim Altarpiece, disillusioned by attempts to involve
himself in politics during the sixteenth-century Peasants’ War, who ultimately
has his artistic gift restored to him, has particular resonance, even within
the context of ‘artist operas’, given Hindemith’s own plight during the Third
Reich. It is far more than that, of course; there is (religious) fanaticism; there
are love and renunciation; there is artistic patronage in all its complexity;
there are artistic inspiration and the lack thereof; there is the fascinating, compromised yet wise
figure of Albrecht of Brandenburg. In a sense, as one of my Twitter followers
remarked the other day, it is everything Pfitzner’s Palestrina ought to have been, yet is not. (The latter work retains
a cult, which seems to be not entirely dissociated from the composer’s
repellent nationalist politics.)

Bertrand de Billy gave a more
impressive performance than I have previously heard from him. Whereas his
Mozart has tended towards the anonymous, this was a powerful reading which,
courtesy of tirelessly committed playing from the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, penetrated
to the core of Hindemith’s musical imagination. What can readily sound like
Busoni without the sense of fantasy – in a sense, though only in one sense, it
is a bit like that – here resounded with dignity, counterpoint and form
defiantly present, reasserting their presence against musical philistinism whether
of the 1930s or of today, and allied more closely than some of Hindemith’s
previous operatic work, to dramatic requirements. Choral singing, from the Slovak Philharmonic Choir, was of the highest standard throughout: weighty yet never in the slightest diffuse, and capable of impressive dynamic contrast and shading.

The cast was strong too, in
some cases very strong indeed. Wolfgang Koch proved an heroic Mathis. If
occasionally his voice tired towards the end, that fitted perfectly well with
the drama. Otherwise, his multi-faceted portrayal – kindly, thoughtful,
tortured – was as impressive for its verbal acuity as for its command of
musical line. It is, quite simply, a privilege to hear so committed a
performance as his. Kurt Streit was an unfailingly intelligent Albrecht. It
could not be said that his vocal performance was always the most beautiful to
listen to, but dramatic concerns were of greater importance. Franz Grundheber
seems incapable of growing old; his Riedinger, the wealthy Protestant on whose
money Albrecht is dependent, was just as well observed as any other performance
I have heard from him. Manuela Uhl, as his daughter Ursula, and Katerina
Tretyakova as Regina, daughter of the peasant leader, Hans Schwalb (a
performance of evident conviction from Raymond Very), both offered at times
ravishing vocal performances matched by fine stage presence and sense. All of
the ‘smaller’ roles were well taken, right down to the individual peasants who
made the shocking rape scene (Countess Helfenstein its victim, harrowingly
portrayed by Magdalena Anna Hofmann) truly come to life.

Mathis (Wolfgang Koch) and demons

Keith Warner’s production
furthered that too, of course. That particular scene, in which the production
arguably goes further than the libretto, acquired its power as much through the
striking attention afforded every member of the peasant mob as through the idea
itself. As a turning point in which Mathis is impelled back towards art, it is
crucial – and certainly proved so here. Class hatred – the term may be
anachronistic for the sixteenth century, but so, by definition, is a subsequent
artistic treatment – and mass psychosis did their work, just as they did when
Hindemith was writing. Much the same could be said of the book-burning we witness. At the centre of the production lies an extraordinary
giant statue of Christ crucified, prefiguring the altarpiece to come, taking
form during the mistily staged Prelude, piercing our consciousness during the
action just as its agonising nail does Christ’s foot, and subsequently coming
apart, inducing and encompassing both Mathis’s fateful dream and the artwork
itself. The sixth-scene dream, in which, confronted not only by figures from
his – and the opera’s past – and a chorus of demons, but also by Saints Anthony
and Paul, the latter in Albrecht’s guise, is staged with a fine eye both to the
torment and to the potential consolation afforded by artistic creation, even
during, perhaps especially during, times of political torment. The insanity of
the dream-world, flailing demons and all – a splendidly writhing contribution
from the Statisterie des Theater an der Wien – gains focus and eventually
direction from the Pauline intervention. (Surely this is St Paul’s sole
operatic appearance to date? I should gladly be corrected.) Mathis is thereby
enable to do his work and prepare for death: a sobering and, in the best sense,
‘authentic’ vision.

All considered, then, this
was a triumph for the Theater an der Wien, for the estimable artists engaged,
and not least for Hindemith himself. Cameras were present in the theatre; let
us hope a DVD may be in the offing. Any
chance, perhaps, of Busoni’s Doktor Faust?

Andrés Orozco-Estrada opened
his music directorship of the Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich with a
performance of Mahler’s First Symphony: an apt choice for new beginnings. Now
Orozco-Estrada and his orchestra have moved on to the Second. With residencies
in both Vienna (the Musikverein), and in Lower Austria (the ‘Niederosterreich’
of its present name), namely at the St Pölten Festspielhaus and at the Grafenegg
Festival, this orchestra nevertheless retains a connection, at least in name
and arguably in spirit, with the Vienna Tonkünstler-Sozietät, founded in 1771,
and more strongly with the Verein Weiner Tonkünstler-Orchester, whose name I
repeatedly come across in my Schoenberg research; indeed, it gave the premiere
under Franz Schreker of Gurrelieder
in 1913. There was ample Viennese and Austrian tradition, then, upon which to
call, but how would the performance turn out in practice? Very well, indeed, as
it turned out. Following a period characterised by a double whammy of massive
over-exposure for Mahler’s music and for the most part inferior, pointless
performances thereof, this concert, along with Daniele Gatti’s truly outstanding account of the Fifth earlier this year with the
Philharmonia, helped restore my faith in contemporary Mahler performance.

It certainly did no harm
experiencing a fine Mahler performance in the Musikverein; no London hall could
come close to providing the acoustical advantages. The opening of the first
movement immediately emphasised both cleanness of attack and roundness of sonority. Yet one would have to experience a
performance worthy of the name too – and, whilst not flawless, this most
certainly was. A strong sense of rhythm imparted a sense of fate, of
pre-ordination. Unisons, even early on, had a Brucknerian power, though Mahler’s
score is of course for the most part far more variegated. The Tonkünstler
Orchestra’s tone was very different from that of the ORF Symphony Orchestra, whom I had heard in the same hall a week previously: less golden, but with
greater edge and more precise, the sloppiness of the latter orchestra’s playing
of Berg’s Three Orchestral Pieces brought into greater relief by the contrast. Sweeter
and edgier sounds both have their advantages; here, consciously or otherwise,
bitterness and anger came to the fore. Baleful woodwind, oboes especially
sounding very much in the Viennese tradition, heightened the effect, though they
could contribute equally well to the almost epiphanic contrast of those magical
vistas, physical and metaphysical, Mahler conjures up, looking forward to
without prefiguring the final Auferstehung.
Orozco-Estrada imparted a highly effective dazed impression to sections of the
development, before the ‘hero’ lashed out. Battle royal between the two
tendencies characterised the drama played out, the recapitulation emerging all
the blacker as a result. Indeed, this must have been one of the most chilling
accounts of this movement I have heard, at times close to the Sixth Symphony,
even to the Second Viennese School. An unfortunate passage of intonational
problems during the recapitulation could readily be overlooked in the greater
scheme of things. The chorus entered at the end of the movement: not quite what
Mahler had in mind in requesting a period of silence; nor was audience chatter,
but anyway... At least the orchestra took the opportunity to re-tune.

The second movement struck a
nice balance between post-Romantic Sehnsucht
– almost literally seeking to see – and something nastier, more ‘modernistic’,
for want of a better word. Interestingly, however, it was the well-nigh
Beethovenian rhythmic insistence Orozco-Estrada elicited from his players,
strings in particular, on which that darker side of proceedings was founded.
(One moment in which the players drifted slightly apart was soon put right.)
Pizzicato playing in this context was not so innocent as one might have
suspected, yet without inappropriately beckoning the deathly marionettes of Mahler’s
Ninth Symphony.

There was greater malevolence
to be heard, of course, in the third movement, though again it was not unduly
exaggerated and thereby emerged all the more powerful. Mahler’s rhythms were
tight and yet humanly conveyed; they did much of the work. The movement was
sardonic, at times shading into nihilistic, yet those characteristics came from
within rather than being externally applied – as far too often one hears. The
end calls for (relative) exaggeration and received it; whilst remaining
skilfully integrated into the movement’s overall form, it also looked forward
with rightful uncertainty to what was – might be? – to come.

Though there were a couple of
uncertainties of a less propitious kind to the opening of the fourth movement –
both from orchestral brass and from a telephone: when shall we be delivered
from such selfishness? – and I initially felt that a more hushed quality would
have helped, the more forthright quality adopted by Orozco-Estrada and Janina
Baechle had its own rewards. One could certainly hear Baechle’s every word –
unlike, say, the soloist in a performance a few days earlier of Mahler’s Fourth – and she exuded a
maternal consolation that put me a little in mind of Brahms’s German Requiem. The oboe solo proved
magically imploring, its phrasing beautifully shaped. Ideally paced and varied
by Oroczo-Estrada, this movement also offered orchestral colours and textures
that seemed to peer forward to the later world of the Rückert-Lieder. Above all, it was the patent sincerity of the
performances, especially that of Baechle, that won me over.

After the relief of ‘O
Röschen rot!’ we were immediately plunged back – forward? – into Mahler’s
musico-dramatic transformation of the symphony in the finale. (Should that be
symphonic transformation of the music-drama? It should probably be both.) There
was no doubt that there was a good way to travel yet, reminiscences of material
past both tugging back and impelling forward: mid-way, as it were, between
Wagner and Beethoven, goal-orientation both immanent and yet questioned.
Off-stage brass were excellent, likewise the rest of the orchestra; I
especially relished dark-hued bassoons and double basses. A sense of pilgrimage
– via Berlioz’s Harold? – was conveyed
through steadiness that yet progressed, not least through, or perhaps even
despite, the offices of Meistersinger-ish
counterpoint. Grave brass evoked Fafner and yet also something more ancient,
cutting very much to the core of Mahler’s Dante-like imagination. Shivers were
sent down the spine, not out of mere sensuous pleasure, but from the thrill of
foreboding, of the apocalypse to come. We talk of Ives, and not unreasonably,
as a great pioneer, but much of what the American composer achieved seemed to be
present here already: chaotic, yet also far more accomplished, a march of
humanity with all its imperfection and yet also its ultimate nobility of
spirit. Or so Mahler, the Church to which he would convert, and indeed the
Jewish faith in which the composer was raised, would have us believe. (The
alternative is simply too dreadful to contemplate, as the twentieth century
would discover.) The slick and utterly meaningless manipulations I heard
employed by Simon Rattle in a Berlin performance of this symphony had nothing upon this true
matter of life and death. Brass from outside the hall again brought Berlioz to
mind: this time, the Grande messe des
morts. Then an uneasy, yet hopeful, calm descended, needful of somewhere to
head, answered by the awe-inspiring grosse
Appel and its strange echoes from flute and piccolo. The destination, of
course, as in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – and especially a Wagnerian
understanding thereof – was the Word, arguably with a more theological element
here too. Impressive unanimity amongst an excellent Wiener Singverein, above
which Juliane Banse’s soprano could soar quite magically, prepared the way for
redemption of the orchestra. (A Mahlerian answer to Parsifal’s enigma?) Not everything was perfect – should it be in
Mahler? Well, only if allied to the musical understanding of a Boulez – for there
were occasional imperfections of tone, though nothing remotely serious. Far
more important, as authentically Mahlerian a spirit was summoned as I can
recall for quite some time, especially in this symphony. (Arguably since I
heard it chezBoulez
himself.) Baechle’s sincerity – that word again – on ‘O Glaube...’ was
deeply moving, the choral response direct and
carefully shaded. Orozco-Estrada carefully handled the mounting tension until
the release of ‘Sterben werd’ich, um zu leben!’ It was thrilling and consoling, in a performance imbued
with the Glauben (faith) of which
Klopstock and Mahler spoke. As bells pealed and the organ thundered, my Glauben in Mahler performance was well
and truly restored.

What we need are fewer,
better Mahler performances: special occasions, mouted only when a conductor
actually has something to say, not endless cycles from superannuated ‘maestri’ programmed
in order to fill much-needed anniversary gaps. On this showing, moreover, the
Colombian Oroczo-Estrada is a true Mahlerian: a far more interesting and
thoughtful musician than an endlessly-hyped colleague from across the border. I
hope that we shall hear much more of

I had been very taken with
Elisabeth Kulman’s voice when I heard her in
the title role of Gluck’s Orfeo
under Riccardo Muti at the 2010 Salzburg Festival. The opportunity to hear her
in a Liederabend with pianist Eduard
Kutrowatz therefore seemed an inviting prospect. Kulman certainly has an
engaging recital presence, offering a little commentary between some of the
sets, and it was a pleasure to hear her rich, at times almost instrumental,
voice once again.

It was, moreover, a pleasure
to hear six songs, two sets of three, by Liszt on the programme, this duo
recently having recorded a Liszt recital. Liszt is still of course ignored or
at best patronised, a few piano works being trotted out again and again, often
though by no means always by pianists who are pianists first and musicians
second. (Thank goodness, then, for musicians such as Pollini
and Aimard.)
The composer’s songs are programmed from time to time, though again not many of
them, and they stand far less central in the repertoire than they should.
Kutrowatz for the most part stood as a trusty guide, the harmony at the end of
the opening Es muß ein Wunderbares sein
unmistakeably Lisztian, especially on the second ‘sagen’. Likewise, the opening
harmonies of Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
beautifully evoked Il penseroso,
signalling weightier things than in the preceding Einst, whose initial flightiness had yet given way to something
deeper, though not heavy. The unusual depth to Kulman’s voice announced itself
from the very opening of the first song, piano offering crucial rhythmic
underpinning, whilst Ein Fichtenbaum
offered drama in her vocal delivery, without degenerating into or even slightly
suggesting something ‘operatic’.

Frauenliebe
und –leben received a
good performance, Though the opening of its first song was almost peremptory –
it often is – it soon settled down. In ‘Er das Herrlichste von allen,’ words
were projected against a piano part that sounded like a veritable reproduction
of the human heartbeat, words and all. That song’s final stanza offered
imploring, angry, and proud sides to Kulman’s interpretation. Expectation,
however, continued very much to be a guiding principle, for instance during ‘Helft
mir, ihr Schwestern’, leading up to a nicely impetuous ‘An meinem Herzen’.
Finally, in ‘Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan,’ we heard a little,
though not too much, of the operatic lament, the tragic heroine. After such
pain, the piano postlude proved almost unbearably touching, necessarily soaked
in the experience of what had gone before. If I had not always felt quite so
involved by the performances as I might have hoped, I certainly did by the end.

Three songs by Albin Fries
opened the second half. It is always an interesting prospect to hear music by a
composer of whom one has never heard, yet sometimes there is good reason for his lack of renown. Fries, it transpires, is the composer of
two operas (Nora and Tizian) as well as songs, piano pieces,
and chamber music. My initial reaction was astonishment that the songs we heard
had been written towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first
century. Yet even if they had been written a hundred years earlier – and untimeliness,
as Strauss or indeed Nietzsche might attest, can very occasionally prove a
virtue – they would hardly have convinced. Essentially neo-Romantic – perhaps not
even ‘neo-’? – with occasional, very tame, ‘wrong’ notes redolent of the cocktail
lounge, the songs proved uninteresting, unmemorable to a fault. Sub-sub-sub-Strauss
harmonies, with hints perhaps of something French, were contradicted by a distinct
lack of Strauss’s highly developed sense of form and sheer craftsmanship. Each
song, including one, Mein Garten,
with a text by Hofmannsthal himself, meandered along quite without consequence.
Performances were undoubtedly committed, yet I could not help but ask myself:
to what end?

Schubert followed. First came
the D 497 An die Nachtigall, though
the programme unfortunately provided the text for D 196. If I found the first
two songs in this group a little generalised, Der Zwerg was a definite highlight. Schubert in ballad mode was
afforded a keen sense of narrative thrust from both artists. If Erlkönig was almost inevitably brought
to mind, this yet remained very much its own piece, music-dramatic through and
through. Not for the first time I reflected on the often overlooked kinship
between Schubert and Wagner.

It was to Liszt that we
returned for the final set. High Romanticism seemed more suited to Vergiftet sind meine Lieder, a wonderful
Heine setting, than it had to Goethe’s Es
war ein König in Thule, though Kutrowatz occasionally struggled, seemingly
less ‘inside’ the music than Kulman. The pianist was in much better form fro
the closing Lenau Drei Zigeuner. He
even allowed himself – and us – a lengthy pause during the piano introduction,
until someone finally switched off his/her mobile telephone, the culprit
treated with better humour than was deserved. Kulman offered a winning impression
of the gypsy world in her vocal performance; there was a genuine sense of the
improvisatory to the performance as a whole. I am less than convinced that this
particular song shows Liszt at his finest, but anyway...

This recital will be
broadcast on Austrian Radio 1 (Ö1), on 21 January 2013, at 10.05 Austrian time.